CGI is the death of theatre, yawn.

There is a scene in Cannibal Holocaust where the Shamatari (one of the three featured "cannibal" tribes) are grotesquely murdering some captured Yanomamo. Two men are dragging what looks like a stone axe wrapped with cloth up and down a girl's chest. Why are they doing that? They may be tenderising the meat in some way, but it's hard to be sure. The 'effect' as such is not particularly convincing, but neither are most of the others in the film. For some reason, it doesn't seem to matter. Most viewers don't seem to notice - not even the wig falling off the 'severed head' of Faye in the final massacre. So what power does Cannibal Holocaust possess? Does it have this power in spite of its bad effects, or partly because of them? The scene with the Shamatari is highly theatrical; it is a staged vision of hell. And the means that it uses are theatrical means.

Peter Hall, in an essay comparing the cinema to the stage, wrote that the miracle of theatre was that with a few bare boards and some simple props, one could create a world, a world that the audience would enter, and that would be completely real to them. Whereas in the cinema - one duff effect and the spell is broken, the magic is ruined! But perhaps this is a distinction between different kinds of film, as much as between theatre and cinema. Some directors are, after all, extremely theatrical. John Waters is a good example. The pantomime sets of Desperate Living are entirely convincing, albeit made out of scavenged trash and cardboard. Mortville is as real as if I saw it on the TV - maybe more so. The limitations of certain films - the technical limitations they have in terms of presenting the 'real' - signal to the audience that what they are watching is not merely real. What they are watching is not therefore a failure, but something with artistic intention like a play or a poem. Something, therefore, with artistic power. In a performance of Titus Andronicus, and I think too, in one of Sarah Kane's plays, blood was symbolised pouring from the wounds of the characters by using long red streamers. And yet the audience were still shocked and traumatised - perhaps all the more so. Imagine Cannibal Holocaust with FX by Tom Savini. It would be a film drained of its improvisatory, theatrical imagination, and hence most of its artistic authority. The best thing about the zombies in a Romero film is their simple grey make up with well-perfused fingers and eyelids. Night of the Living Dead in particular gains in power from the cheap effects. The worst thing is the realistic entrails, the slop and the showpiece dismemberments that do nothing to save or elevate Day of the Dead. They are too convincing - mere technical achievements. The audience look on with indifference.

Having said that, I don't mean to imply that a 'theatrical' effect is a bad one - only, that it will not be a seamless one, that it never aims at superrealist precision. The effects themselves will be all the more imaginative - but using the kind of simple stage tricks seen in Ringu, for example, when Sadako crawls from the TV set. Not difficult to work out how they did that! But it was a scene that drove a nail into the audience. It shouldn't be difficult to work out how they impaled the girl in Cannibal Holocaust, but even Italian judges and British customs officials were convinced it had 'actually happened'. It's not because these sort of people are stupid - as some would have us believe - and not because a more elaborate effect would have had some give-away CGI sheen, but because the bare-bones theatrical techniques signal the presence of an artistic as opposed to a technical vision, and have the most artistic power. And it is the heart of Cannibal Holocaust that people find so disturbing.